Looking at Women Looking: Female Portraits in the Gender Crisis. — Page 8:
36 In the course of the nineteenth century, as ways of seeing challenged active participation, increasing agency was attributed to the seeing subject. This participatory agency meant a resistance to absorption by the referential content of an art work. Instead of looking exclusively at the meanings and codes contained within visual images themselves, or exclusively at the receptive side of visual experience, an approach to the "gaze" should concentrate on issues arising from the interaction of viewer and viewed. Here Lee's definition of aesthetic experience as a process of interaction can contribute to a revision of current concepts of spectatorship. Twentieth century feminist theories of spectatorship were based on the dualism that "men act and women appear" (Berger 47). The concept of the gaze later differentiated in Griselda Pollock's and Linda Nead's analysis of Victorian images of women might be more profitably thought of not as a fixed feature, but as a range of viewing possibilities adopted temporarily by viewers in specific encounters with images. With Marcia Pointon, I think that "there is no absolute and inalienable correlation between the gender of a reader and the experience of reading [paintings]" (9). Instead, temporary viewing communities and shifting gazes allow strategies of selective attention or resistant viewing which can be helpful in the face of today's ever increasing predominance of visual events and globalization of images.